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      Letitia James Drops Out of N.Y. Governor’s Race

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      The move by the state attorney general, which instantly upended the governor’s race, seemed to solidify Gov. Kathy Hochul’s front-runner status.Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, announced on Thursday that she was ending her campaign for governor and running instead for re-election, a surprising move that upended the high-profile governor’s race and further solidified Gov. Kathy Hochul’s standing.Ms. James had just entered the race in late October, on the heels of her office’s devastating report on sexual harassment claims against former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, which led to his resignation. She was immediately treated as a top contender, buoyed by her record and her historic bid to become the first Black female governor in the country.But recent opinion polls had shown Ms. James trailing Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female governor, by double digits among Democratic primary voters. She was believed to be significantly behind the governor in fund-raising, according to many party strategists and donors, and had struggled to secure high-profile endorsements from the politicians and labor unions who typically help crown winners in New York, despite her years in city and state politics.“I have come to the conclusion that I must continue my work as attorney general,” Ms. James, a Democrat, wrote in a statement, barely six weeks after entering the race. She said that she wanted to “finish the job” on several “important investigations and cases” under her purview.The announcement came on the day that it became known that Ms. James’s office intended to subpoena former President Donald J. Trump to testify in a civil fraud investigation.Ms. James, whose office is also participating in the criminal investigation being run by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., is seeking to question Mr. Trump under oath on Jan. 7 as part of her separate civil inquiry into his business practices. She also continues to litigate a closely watched case against the National Rifle Association, as well as lawsuits involving Facebook, Google, Amazon and the New York Police Department, and she is investigating a seven-figure deal on a book that Mr. Cuomo penned as governor.New York bars candidates from running for two statewide offices at once, so Ms. James would have had to give up a relatively secure job as attorney general to continue to pursue the governorship.Her allies argued that Ms. James genuinely relishes her current position. Ultimately, it appears that she did not want to give that up for the rigors of a different campaign she was far from certain to win, against an incumbent governor with whom she did not have overwhelming disagreements.“Tish James loves what she’s doing, she’s a very passionate person, she has a lot of respect for Gov. Hochul,” said Alan Rubin, a lobbyist in New York City who backed Ms. James’s candidacy. “It wasn’t, clearly you could say, ‘I’m definitely in because I don’t agree with this person’s policies, I don’t like them.’”Ms. Hochul, who was elevated from lieutenant governor after Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, was already the early favorite in the race. But Ms. James’s exit further smoothed her path, as a number of Democrats who had either stayed on the sidelines or backed Ms. James — Mr. Rubin among them — signaled that they now intended to support the governor.“Kathy has accomplished more in four months than many of her predecessors in an entire term,” said Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in vote-rich Brooklyn.She added that Ms. Hochul was “the best choice to lead our state forward through the recovery, and she will have the support of Brooklyn behind her as she continues to blaze a path as our first female governor.”While Ms. Hochul still faces spirited challenges from her right and left, including a possible run by Mayor Bill de Blasio, she signaled on Thursday that she was already focused on November’s general election. Representative Lee Zeldin, a Long Island Republican, is considered the leading Republican candidate.In recent weeks, some supporters and would-be supporters of Ms. James had grown increasingly skeptical of the trajectory of her campaign as Ms. Hochul continued to outpace her in public polling and to fund-raise aggressively.One elected official who had initial conversations with the James team about an endorsement noticed that follow-up from her team seemed to taper off over the last week. The endorsement never came together.And a state senator said that colleagues in Albany, even some who share her ideological outlook, had been hesitant to endorse Ms. James, given Ms. Hochul’s leverage during the state’s annual legislative season and the once-in-a-decade redistricting process.Ms. James held deliberations with around a half-dozen of her closest advisers on Wednesday and made the decision to drop out that day, according to several people with direct knowledge of the conversations, granted anonymity to discuss the internal developments. Her first call announcing her decision on Thursday was to Ms. Hochul, two of those people said.Ms. Hochul later said that she would support Ms. James’s re-election campaign and looked forward to “having her on the ticket as we head into the November election together.”The move took others within Ms. James’s campaign by surprise. In roughly the last week, offers had been extended for several senior-level jobs, and more campaign events were being readied, according to someone with direct knowledge of the activities who was granted anonymity to discuss the private plans.A number of Ms. James’s allies strongly dispute the idea that she exited the race out of concerns around money, endorsements or early-stage polls, pointing to her track record of winning challenging races in the past. A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 6A crowded field. More

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      Democrats' Infighting Only Helps Republicans

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      The other day, something extraordinary happened. I went six hours — maybe even seven — without seeing anything on the internet about what a disaster Kamala Harris is.I must have been haunting the wrong sites. I’d clearly failed to check in with Twitter. Whatever the reason, I had a reprieve from Democratic carping about Democratic crises that reflected Democratic disunity and brimmed with Democratic doomsaying. Being briefly starved of it made me even more aware of the usual buffet — and of Democrats’ insatiable hunger for devouring their own.To follow Harris’s media coverage, made possible by the keening and wailing of her Democratic colleagues and Democratic analysts, she’s not merely mismanaging an apparently restless, frustrated staff. She’s bursting into flames and incinerating everything in her midst, including Democrats’ hopes of holding on to the White House in 2024.The chatter around Joe Biden is hardly cheerier. Riveted by low approval ratings for him that they’ve helped to create, Democrats in government murmur to Democrats in the media that he’s in dire political straits — which is partly true, thanks in some measure to all those fellow Democrats. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently in a cover story for New York magazine, Biden is trapped “between a well-funded left wing that has poisoned the party’s image with many of its former supporters and centrists unable to conceive of their job in any terms save as valets for the business elite.”“Biden’s party has not veered too far left or too far right so much as it has simply come apart,” Chait added. And it has done so noisily, its internal discontents as public as can be.These intraparty recriminations aren’t unusual in and of themselves: Democrats have never possessed Republicans’ talent for unity. But the intensity of the anger and angst are striking, especially given the stakes. A Republican takeover of Congress in 2022 and of the presidency two years later would endanger more than the social safety net. It would imperil democracy itself.“Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real,” Barton Gellman wrote for The Atlantic this month. “Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.”Gellman’s article, titled “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” had an apocalyptic tone, matched by an accompanying note by the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. He wrote that while he prefers to avoid “partisan entanglement,” he and the rest of us must confront the truth: “The leaders of the Republican Party — the soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior — are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.”Chait put it this way: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the fate of American democracy may hinge on President Joe Biden’s success.”But the media is drawn to, and amplifies, Biden’s failures. The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently collaborated with the data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote to measure journalists’ treatment of Biden versus Trump, and he concluded that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy,” he wrote, later adding: “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”That news media includes more Democrats than Republicans. And its naysaying depends on the irascibility and volubility of Democratic officials complaining about other Democratic officials. Democrats don’t need Pelotons: They’ve turned finger pointing into an aerobic workout.Such self-examination and self-criticism are healthy to a point. And Democratic pessimism isn’t unfounded: Polls show real frustration and impatience among Americans, who reliably pin the blame on whoever is in charge. Additionally, the party’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race — and the implications of that — can’t be ignored.But neither can the potential consequences of some Democratic politicians’ refusals to compromise and come together. None of the ideological rifts within the party matter as much as what the current crop of Trump-coddling Republicans might do if given the chance.So enough about Biden’s age, about Harris’s unpopularity, about the impossibility of figuring out precisely the right note of Omicron caution, about lions and tigers and bears, oh my! It’s scary out there, sure. But it’ll be scarier still if Democrats can’t successfully project cooperation, confidence and hope.For the Love of SentencesPismo Beach, Calif., in 1951.Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty ImagesYou’re going to giggle or groan at this line by Justin Ray, in The Los Angeles Times, about the disappearance of bivalves from a California beach: “The clam community’s crash created a calamity.” (Thanks to Roy Oldenkamp of West Hollywood, Calif., for spotting and nominating this.)Same goes for this headline on an article in The Bulwark about a certain physician’s recently announced Senate bid: “Dr. Oz Quacks the Code of Republican Politics.” (Steve Read, Nice, France)Here’s Derek Thompson in The Atlantic on the devolution of Congress: “From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters, or less than one per year. Since 2010, it has had an average of 80 such votes annually. The Senate was once known as the ‘cooling saucer of democracy,’ where populist notions went to chill out a bit. Now it’s the icebox of democracy, where legislation dies of hypothermia.” (Weigang Qiu, Queens, N.Y.) Derek’s entire article is insightful, thought-provoking and very much worth reading.Here’s Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal on some of the more untraditional proposals for restoring the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, damaged from that 2019 fire: “Is that lovely victim, saved in the nick of time and made whole again, now to be whisked, still groggy, straight from the hospital into the tattoo parlor of contemporary art?” (Jim Lader, Bronxville, N.Y., and Kathleen Hopkins, Oak Park, Ill.)In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek commentary in The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri advocated the banning of all books: “They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows.” (Irma Wolfson, Irvine, Calif.) I was equally fond of these additional snippets: “Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside.” They “replace your answers with questions or questions with answers.” “They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again.”Moving on to standouts from The Times: Reggie Ugwu profiled Ron Cephas Jones, noting that he’s “the kind of actor who works like chipotle mayo — you don’t always think to look for him, but you’re happy when he shows up.” (Peggy Sweeney, Sarasota, Fla.)Following his return to an area of Alaska that he hadn’t visited in more than 35 years, Jon Waterman contemplated climate change and caribou: “We didn’t see many, but we knew they were out there, somewhere, cantering in synchronized, thousandfold troupes, inches apart yet never jostling one another, their leg tendons a veritable orchestra of clicking castanets, their hooves clattering on stones.” (Harriet Odlum, Bloomfield, Conn., and Robert Lakatos, Glenmoore, Pa.)Adam Friedlander for The New York TimesIn Bret Stephens’s weekly online conversation with Gail Collins, he noted: “The supply-chain situation has gotten so out of hand that there’s even a cream-cheese shortage at New York City bagel shops, which is like one of the 10 biblical plagues as reimagined by Mel Brooks.” (Susan Gregory, Bala Cynwyd, Pa., and Deborah Paulus-Jagric, Landvetter, Sweden, among others)In a review of the Mel Brooks memoir “All About Me!,” Alexandra Jacobs trots out the technical term for fear of heights to fashion this gem: “Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock.” (Jennifer Finney Boylan, Rome, Maine)And in a preview of the new limited series on HBO Max “And Just Like That,” which continues and updates “Sex and the City,” Alexis Soloski noted how little about its plot was revealed or known in advance: “Eager fans have analyzed that 30-second teaser clip with the exegetical rigor typically reserved for ancient hieroglyphs.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Mike ValerioMany of you chide me if I go two weeks or more without publishing an image of my furry companion. I love you for that. So here she is, during our walk on Sunday morning. We covered five miles, mostly in the woods, which we had to ourselves, because we headed out early and the weather was cold. She looked for deer and settled for squirrels, sprinting madly toward many of those she spotted. Much about dogs fascinates me but nothing more than their mix of tameness and wildness — of gentleness and ferocity — and the suddenness with which they shift between the two. One minute, a hugger. The next, a huntress. Regal all the while.What I’m Reading (and Watching, and Listening To)The director Jane Campion, right, on the set of “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixPeople are often more complicated than you imagine. So is life. Both of those truisms animate Bill Adair’s engrossing, moving account, in Air Mail, of Stephen Glass’s journey after he was exposed as one of contemporary journalism’s most prolific and audacious fabulists. Glass went on to tell another big lie. But you may find yourself cheering him for it.Moral complexity: It’s present in the elegant, addictive novels of Amor Towles, and I’m currently listening to, and relishing, his latest, “The Lincoln Highway.” The Times’s adoring review of it is precisely right.A friend and I have argued fiercely over the director Jane Campion’s latest film, “The Power of the Dog,” which is streaming on Netflix. He thinks that it’s genius. I think that it’s overrated — and that, like some of Campion’s other work, it plods at times, more cerebral than visceral, a bid for your admiration rather than your involvement. But the intensity of our back-and-forth means that there’s plenty in “Dog” to chew on. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I’m glad I watched it.On a Personal NoteI’m sick of the sound of my own voice.I know, I know: Writing those words is like wearing a “kick me” sign. The obvious rejoinder is that you’re sick of my voice, too. But you’d mean my musings, my opinions, and I mean the actual sound of my audible voice. I mean that I’ve been in a recording studio for much of this week, talking and talking and talking into a microphone.My next book is done — more on that below — and for the audio format, the publishers asked me to be the one to read it aloud. That made abundant sense: The book is largely about my own experiences, with long stretches in the first person. But, still, I was hoping they’d recruit someone else.That’s because I’ve done this twice previously, for earlier books, and it’s no cakewalk. (Or should that be caketalk?) You have to go slowly and enunciate clearly, and if you bobble a word, you redo much of the sentence or even paragraph. Forward, backward, forward, backward. You’re a Sisyphus of syllables.For my memoir “Born Round,” I was in a studio in Manhattan devoted to audiobooks. I noticed a basket of muffins and bagels right outside the airless, soundproof booth in which the reader sits. “How hospitable!” I thought.No. How strategic. Many readers, like me, have skipped breakfast and may be planning, for efficiency’s sake, to skip lunch. Their stomachs growl. Mine did. And the microphone picked it up. The solution was a chunk of sound-muffling starch.The studio’s technicians told me that some of the actors hired to record novels refuse those calories. So blankets are wrapped around their tiny waists, to silence hunger’s roar.The studio I’ve been using this week is here in Chapel Hill, N.C., just a 15-minute drive from my house. I’ve eaten a light breakfast each morning; my stomach has behaved. And so the audio should be ready for release, along with hardcover and digital versions, on March 1.The book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” is about my brush with the prospect of blindness and how that changed the way I look at setbacks and limits and aging. And I mention it in part as a segue into an update on my eyes, which many of you kindly and regularly ask about.My right eye will forever be useless for reading, computer work and the like, but my left eye hangs in there, undiminished. The nature of what happened to me, a kind of stroke of the optic nerve, is such that if my left eye does fail me, it is likely to do so in an instant. There’s perhaps a 20 percent chance of that.So I’ll be good until I’m not. But even then, I’ll manage. That’s what I’ve come to see. That’s what the book is really about: acceptance, resilience, optimism. It describes the honing of those qualities. It’s also the fruit of them.It’s alchemy — trepidation into determination — or at least intends to be. And the opportunity to tell my story is a privilege, as is the invitation to perform it, no matter how Sisyphean. I shush my stomach. I clear my throat. I raise my voice. I even make peace with it. More

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      The Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Running as the Anti-Dr. Oz

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      In the closely watched Pennsylvania Senate race, Val Arkoosh, a doctor in the Democratic primary, sees openings to raise her profile.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Dr. Val Arkoosh is the Pennsylvania Senate candidate who is often an afterthought compared to the two front-running Democrats, John Fetterman and Conor Lamb.But a couple big recent developments — the chance of the Supreme Court sweeping away Roe v. Wade and the entry of Dr. Mehmet Oz into the race’s Republican primary — may give her underdog campaign new momentum.Dr. Arkoosh, a physician in obstetric anesthesiology and a top elected official in Montgomery County in the Philadelphia suburbs, is trying to pitch herself as a kind of anti-Dr. Oz.“It really does take a doctor to stand up to a doctor,” Dr. Arkoosh told me. “I don’t even know how he still has a license, with some of the stuff that comes out his mouth,” she said of his promotion of unproved Covid-19 treatments early in the pandemic.Dr. Oz, a celebrity doctor who, until recently, hosted “The Dr. Oz Show,” is well positioned, thanks to personal wealth and high name recognition, to become a front-runner in a G.O.P. field where no one has yet nailed down voters’ allegiance. The contest to fill Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat will be one of the hardest fought in the country in 2022, with majority control of the Senate at stake.Dr. Oz, who jumped into the race last week, is framing his candidacy as a conservative’s response to the pandemic, pushing back against mandates, shutdowns and limits to “freedom.” Dr. Arkoosh, on the other hand, helped lead an aggressive response to the pandemic as the leader of the Montgomery County board of commissioners. In an interview, she contrasted her efforts to ensure the safety of students in her county to Dr. Oz’s position on schools at the time: During the same month that she canceled graduation ceremonies last year, Dr. Oz urged on Fox News that schools should be open because it “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality” of the population. He later said he “misspoke.”In response to Dr. Arkoosh’s criticism, a spokeswoman for Dr. Oz’s campaign, Erin Perrine, pointed to his success as a heart surgeon and to his TV show and books, which she said “empowered millions to make better health care choices — even if it meant going against the medical establishment.”Dr. Arkoosh, 61, has struggled for attention from Democratic voters and donors in the shadow of the leaders of her primary: Mr. Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, and Mr. Lamb, a congressman. The two men are usually contrasted against one another as a progressive (Mr. Fetterman, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016) versus a moderate (Mr. Lamb, who won a congressional district that voted for President Donald J. Trump). Dr. Arkoosh is liberal on issues — she wants to ban fracking and to add a public option to the health care marketplace — but what sets her apart may be demographics. Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb are both from Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania. They each argue that they are best suited to make inroads with white blue-collar voters. Meanwhile, Dr. Arkoosh’s base, Montgomery County — the state’s third most populous and the second richest — is ground zero for the suburban shift to Democrats in recent years. In all, Philadelphia and its suburbs in southeast Pennsylvania contribute 50 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters.“In Montgomery County in 2020, we gave President Biden 66,000 more votes than we gave Hillary Clinton,” Dr. Arkoosh said. “It is where my base is, where my strength is.”Still, J. J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, said that Dr. Arkoosh’s campaign had been underwhelming so far and that she was little known outside Montgomery County.“It costs a lot of money to get known statewide in Pennsylvania, and she appears to be coming up short,” Mr. Balaban told me. “At the moment, she doesn’t have enough funds to win the Philly market, let alone the state.”As of October, Dr. Arkoosh had $1 million in her campaign account, which includes a $500,000 personal loan, and she trails Mr. Fetterman’s $4.2 million on hand and Mr. Lamb’s $2.1 million. Her endorsement by Emily’s List, the abortion rights group, did not seem to have boosted her fund-raising much through September.Even so, the rising prominence of abortion as a potential motivator of Democratic voters in the midterm elections plays to Dr. Arkoosh’s strengths as a doctor. Her specialty means she administers anesthesia to women giving birth and women having abortions.“As a physician who has sat at the bedside of women who have had to make some of the most difficult decisions of their lives,” she said, “there is no place for any politician in those decisions.”Arguments before the Supreme Court last week suggested the conservative majority was ready to reverse or severely limit Roe v. Wade in a ruling next year.“I think this is going to be a very big issue,” Dr. Arkoosh said. “And I think this is going to be an issue that gets women, and particularly suburban women, out in numbers.’’On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      President Biden Praises Bob Dole in Ceremony at the Capitol

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      WASHINGTON — Beneath the dome of the Capitol he loved, Bob Dole was celebrated on Thursday for wit and grace, principle and persistence, but above all for civility and bipartisanship, in a subtle rebuke to a Republican Party that has changed much since Mr. Dole was its standard-bearer.Addressing dignitaries of both parties gathered to honor the son of the Kansas Dust Bowl and a former Senate majority leader, President Biden used Mr. Dole’s own words as a pointed message to adversaries whom he sees as drifting from the moorings of democracy itself.“I cannot pretend that I have not been a loyal champion of my party, but I always served my country best when I did so first and foremost as an American,” Mr. Biden said, quoting what he said were Mr. Dole’s final words to the nation. “When we prioritize principles over party and humanity over personal legacy — when we do that, we accomplish far more as a nation. By leading with shared faith in each other, we become America at its best.”Mr. Dole, who died on Sunday at 98, became only the 30th known man to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, its entryways draped in black bunting, his coffin set upon the catafalque built in 1865 to hold the coffin of Abraham Lincoln. One woman, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has lain in state in the Capitol, but her coffin was placed in National Statuary Hall, adjacent to the Rotunda.President Biden speaks in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington on Thursday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesSpeaker Nancy Pelosi rests her hand on the casket of former Senator Bob Dole.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn a short ceremony, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was the only Republican to eulogize Mr. Dole, whom he eclipsed in 2018 as the longest-serving Senate Republican leader. Mr. McConnell honored the man who had been grievously wounded in the Italian campaign during World War II as the last of the “greatest generation” to run for president, in 1996.“Bob was blessed with long life to watch his legacy take effect,” Mr. McConnell said.The Democrats who spoke — Mr. Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the current majority leader — all extolled virtues in Mr. Dole that they implied were lacking in his successors.Mr. Schumer called him “a principled, pragmatic Kansan” who “never hesitated to work with Democrats.” Ms. Pelosi also spoke of principle, as well as patriotism.But it was the president who used the moment to appeal to the gathering — and the country at large — to rediscover what Americans hold in common.“The truth of the matter is, as divided as we are, the only way forward for democracy is unity, consensus — the only way,” Mr. Biden said. “May we follow his wisdom and his timeless truth and reach consensus on the basic fundamental principles we all agree on.”Thursday morning at the Capitol seemed to recall a less bitter time, in honor of a man who himself spoke to a more perfect union. Not long after Mr. Dole began his presidential campaign, his opponent, Bill Clinton, was impeached amid extraordinary ill will. As Mr. Dole was leaving the Senate in 1996 to assume the mantle of his party’s nominee, he famously took a call from Mr. Clinton, spoke warmly to him and concluded, “I want to just thank you for all the times we’ve been able to work together.”In a short ceremony, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was the only Republican to eulogize Mr. Dole.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesRepresentative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, right, hugs a guest at the ceremony. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Just months after Mr. Clinton defeated Mr. Dole, the president awarded his vanquished opponent the Presidential Medal of Freedom.“Upon receiving this medal, Senator Dole challenged us, in his words, ‘not to question American ideals or replace them, but to act worthy of them,’” Ms. Pelosi said.Mr. McConnell recalled a particularly acerbic quote that Mr. Dole had for the conservative “revolutionaries” who helped the Republicans win majorities in both houses of Congress in 1994; the new majority leader said that if he had known Republicans would win the majority, he would have recruited better candidates. The anecdote may have been a dig by Mr. McConnell at his own right flank, which has been working against his efforts to keep the government from defaulting on its debt in the coming weeks.Before the ceremony, the building was buzzing with friendly joshing. Lloyd J. Austin III, the secretary of defense, chatted with Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. Pat Roberts, a former Republican senator, joined a reunion of fellow Kansans in bidding goodbye to the man from Russell, Kan.Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, arrive at the ceremony on Thursday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times Mr. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth Dole — who later became a senator and ran for president herself — is escorted to the ceremony.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesAnd in the spirit of bipartisanship that was being celebrated — or mourned — two former Senate majority leaders, Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, and Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, met in Mr. McConnell’s office and walked together to the Capitol’s rotunda.The ceremony, in all its solemnity, was known well to Mr. Dole. In one of his last public appearances, he rose from his wheelchair in 2018 to pay his respects to former President George H.W. Bush as he lay in state under the dome, in the geographic center of the nation’s capital. Nine years ago this month, another senator, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, also lay in state and received a send-off from Mr. Dole, a lifelong friend with whom Mr. Inouye had convalesced in a Battle Creek, Mich., military hospital recovering from life-changing war wounds.As Mr. McConnell noted, Mr. Dole had lived long enough to see politics — and his party — change. Just weeks before Mr. Inouye’s death in 2012, Mr. Dole sat slightly slumped in his wheelchair on the Senate floor and accepted the well-wishes of senators he was imploring to vote for a United Nations treaty that would ban discrimination against people with disabilities. He reasoned with them that the United States was already in compliance, and that he merely wanted the rest of the world to recognize the advances that he and other Americans with disabilities already enjoyed.Then, after Mr. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, rolled him off the floor, Republicans voted down the treaty that the ailing Mr. Dole so longed to see passed — but that they insisted would infringe on American sovereignty.A military honor guard carries the coffin of former Senator Bob Dole into the U.S. Capitol, in Washington on Thursday.Tom Brenner for The New York Times More

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      Why Joe Biden Needs More Than Accomplishments to Be a Success

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      No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden. With a razor-thin congressional majority — far smaller than that of Barack Obama — President Biden has delivered two enormous spending bills, with another, the Build Back Better act, likely on its way. Elements of these bills will have a lasting effect on the economy into the next decade; they also push the country to the left.Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?A prisoner of great expectationsThough it came out in 1993, Stephen Skowronek’s “The Politics Presidents Make” helps us understand how Mr. Biden has become a prisoner of great expectations.American politics is punctuated by the rise and fall of political orders or regimes. In each regime, one party, whether in power or not, dominates the field. Its ideas and interests define the landscape, forcing the opposition to accept its terms. Dwight Eisenhower may have been a Republican, but he often spoke in the cadences of the New Deal. Mr. Clinton voiced Reaganite hosannas to the market.Regimes persist across decades. The Jeffersonian regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; the Jacksonian regime, from 1828 to 1860; the Republican regime, from 1860 to 1932; the New Deal order, from 1932 to 1980.Reagan’s market regime of deference to the white and the wealthy has outlasted two Democratic presidencies and may survive a third. We see its presence in high returns to the rich and low wages for work, continents of the economy cordoned off from democratic control and resegregated neighborhoods and schools. Corporations are viewed, by liberals, as more advanced reformers of structural racism than parties and laws, and tech billionaires are seen as saviors of the planet.Eventually, however, regimes grow brittle. Their ideology no longer speaks to the questions of the day; important interests lose pride of place; the opposition refuses to accept the leading party and its values.Every president presides over a regime that is either resilient or vulnerable. That is his situation. When Eisenhower was elected, the New Deal was strong; when Jimmy Carter was elected, it was weak. Every president is affiliated or opposed to the regime. That is his story. James Knox Polk sought to extend the slavocracy, Abraham Lincoln to end it. The situation and the story are the keys to the president’s power — or powerlessness.When the president is aligned with a strong regime, he has considerable authority, as Lyndon Johnson realized when he expanded the New Deal with the Great Society. When the president is opposed to a strong regime, he has less authority, as Mr. Obama recognized when he tried to get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. When the president is aligned with a weak regime, he has the least authority, as everyone from John Adams to Mr. Carter was forced to confront. When the president is opposed to a weak regime, he has the greatest authority, as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan discovered. These presidents, whom Mr. Skowronek calls reconstructive, can reorder the political universe.All presidents are transformative actors. With each speech and every action, they make or unmake the regime. Sometimes, they do both at the same time: Johnson reportedly declared that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, thereby setting the stage for the unraveling of the New Deal.What distinguishes reconstructive presidents from other presidents, even the most transformative like Johnson, is that their words and deeds have a binding effect on their successors from both parties. They create the language that all serious contestants for power must speak. They construct political institutions and social realities that cannot be easily dismantled. They build coalitions that provide lasting support to the regime. Alexander Hamilton thought every president would “reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor.” Reconstructive presidents do that — in fact, they reverse and undo the work of many predecessors — but they also ensure that their heirs cannot.Politics is not physics. A president opposed to the established order may seek to topple it, only to discover that it is too resilient or that his troops are too feeble and lacking in fight. Where we are in political time — whether we are in a reconstructive moment, ripe for reordering, or not — cannot be known in advance. The weakness or strength of a regime, and of the opposition to the regime, is revealed in the contest against it.What is certain is that the president is both creature and creator of the political world around him. Therein lies Mr. Biden’s predicament.The language of reconstructionHeading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, many people thought we might be in a reconstructive moment. I was one of them. There was a popular insurgency from the left, heralding the coming of a new New Deal. It culminated in the Nevada caucus, where people of color and young voters — an emergent multiracial working class — put Bernie Sanders over the top, ready to move the political order to the left.There also were signs that the Reagan regime was vulnerable. Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 suggested that conservative orthodoxies of slashing Social Security and Medicare and waging imperial warfare no longer compelled voters. Mr. Trump’s presidency revealed a congressional G.O.P. that could not unite around a program beyond tax cuts and right-wing judges.As a candidate, Mr. Biden rejected the transformation Mr. Sanders promised and assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch. Yet there were signs, after he won the nomination and into the early months of his administration, of a new, “transformational” Mr. Biden who wanted to be the next F.D.R. The combination of the Covid economy, with its shocking inequalities and market failures, and a summer of fire and flood seemed to authorize a left-leaning politics of permanent cash supports to workers and families, increased taxes on the rich to fund radical expansions of health care, elder care and child care, and comprehensive investments in green energy and infrastructure, with high-paying union jobs.Most important, the package cohered. Instead of a laundry list of gripes and grievances, it featured the consistent items of an alternative ideology and ascendant set of social interests. It promised to replace a sclerotic order that threatens to bury us all with a new order of common life. This was that rare moment when the most partisan of claims can sound like a reasonable defense of the whole.Yet while Mr. Biden has delivered nearly $3 trillion in spending, with another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion likely to pass, he has not created a new order. In addition to a transformation of the economy, such an order would require a spate of democracy reforms — the elimination of the filibuster and curbing of partisan gerrymandering, the addition of new states to the union, and national protection of voting rights and electoral procedures — as well as labor law reforms, enabling workers to form unions.What makes such reforms reconstructive rather than a wish list of good works is that they shift the relations of power and interest, making other regime-building projects possible. Today’s progressive agenda is hobbled less by a lack of popular support than by the outsize leverage conservatives possess — in the Senate, which privileges white voters in sparsely populated, often rural states; in the federal structure of our government, which enables states to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote; and in the courts, whose right-wing composition has been shaped by two Republican presidents elected by a minority of the voters. No progressive agenda can be enacted and maintained unless these deformations are addressed.The only way to overcome anti-democratic forces is by seeding democracy throughout society, empowering workers to take collective action in the workplace and the polity, and by securing democracy at the level of the state. That is what the great emblems of a reconstructive presidency — the 14th Amendment, which granted Black Americans citizenship, or the Wagner Act, which liberated workers from the tyranny of employers — are meant to do. They give popular energy institutional form, turning temporary measures of an insurgent majority into long-term transformations of policy and practice.It’s not clear that Mr. Biden wants such a reconstruction. And even if he did, it’s not clear that he could deliver it.What is stopping Biden?The forces arrayed against a reconstruction are many.The first is the Republican Party. Here the party has benefited less from the “authoritarian” turn of Mr. Trump than from the fact that the Trump presidency was so constrained. As Mr. Skowronek argues, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power.” At critical moments, exercising power was precisely what Mr. Trump was not able to do.Confronting the free fall of the New Deal, Mr. Carter unleashed a stunning strike of neoliberal and neoconservative measures: deregulation of entire industries; appointment of the anti-labor Paul Volcker to the Fed; a military buildup; and renewed confrontation with the Soviet Union. These defied his party’s orthodoxies and unraveled its coalition. Reagan ended the New Deal regime, but Mr. Carter prepared the way.For all his talk of opposition to the Republican pooh-bahs, Mr. Trump delivered what they wanted most — tax cuts, deregulation and judges — and suffered defeat when he tried to break out of their vise. Republicans repeatedly denied him funds to support his immigration plans. They overrode his veto of their military spending bill, something Congress had not been able to do in the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Trump’s own administration defied his Russia policy. This combination of weakness and deference to the G.O.P. helped keep the Republicans — and the Reagan regime — together.The second obstacle is the Democratic Party. There’s a reason party elites, led by Mr. Obama, swiftly closed ranks, when the time came, behind Mr. Biden and against Mr. Sanders. They wanted continuity, not rupture.Likewise a portion of the base. Many Democrats are older, with long memories and strong fears of what happens when liberals turn left (they lose). Newer recruits, who gave Mr. Biden the edge in some key districts, usually in the suburbs, are what the Princeton historian Matt Karp calls “Halliburton Democrats,” wealthy defectors from the Republican Party.“A regime is only as vulnerable as the political forces challenging it are robust,” writes Mr. Skowronek. That robustness is yet to be demonstrated. Despite the clarity of the path the Democrats must take if they hope to topple the Reagan order, it’s not clear the party wants to take it.The third obstacle to a Biden reconstruction is what Mr. Skowronek calls the “institutional thickening” of American politics. Since the founding era, the American political system has acquired a global economy, with the dollar as the world’s currency; a government bureaucracy and imperial military; a dense ecology of media technologies; and armies of party activists. While these forces offer the modern president resources that Jefferson never had, they also empower the modern-day equivalents of Jefferson’s opponents to resist a reconstruction. Should Mr. Biden attempt one, could he master the masters of social media? Mr. Trump tried and was banned from Twitter.The real institutions that get in the way of Mr. Biden and the Democrats, however, are not these latter-day additions of modernity but the most ancient features of the American state.The power of Senators Manchin and Sinema is an artifact of the constitutional design of the Senate and the narrowness of the Democratic majority, which itself reflects the fact that the institution was created to defend slave states rather than popular majorities. Their power is augmented by the centuries-old filibuster, which has forced Mr. Biden to jam many programs into one vaguely named reconciliation bill. That prevents him from picking off individual Republicans for pieces of legislation they might support (as he did with the infrastructure bill).Should the Republicans take the House in 2022, it will probably not be because of Tucker Carlson but because of gerrymandering. Should the Republicans take back the White House in 2024, it will probably be because of some combination of the Electoral College and the control that our federalist system grants to states over their electoral procedures.A polarized electorate divided into red and blue states is not novel; it was a hallmark of the last Gilded Age, which put the brakes on the possibility of a presidential reconstruction for decades. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider argued, the division of the country into the Republican North and Democratic South made the entire polity “extremely conservative because one-party politics tends strongly to vest political power in the hands of people who already have economic power.”How do we move past Reagan?Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” and “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?

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      There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or else loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.This view, that media “neutrality” has a tacit pro-Trump tilt, is associated with prominent press critics like Jay Rosen of New York University and the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan (formerly this newspaper’s public editor) and it recently found data-driven expression in a column by The Post’s Dana Milbank. In a study “using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story,” Milbank reported that after a honeymoon, Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative, or even more negative, than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Given the perils of a Trump resurgence, Milbank warned, this negativity means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”I think this point of view is very wrong. Indeed, I think it’s this view of the press’s role that actually empowers demagogues, feeds polarization and makes crises in our system much more likely.To understand why, let’s look at a case study where, at one level, the people emphasizing the press’s obligation to defend democracy have a point. This would be the Georgia Republican primary for governor, which will pit David Perdue, a former senator who lost his re-election bid in a 2021 runoff, against Brian Kemp, the conservative incumbent who is famously hated by Donald Trump.That hatred is the only reason this primary matchup exists: He is angry at Kemp for fulfilling his obligations as Georgia’s governor instead of going along with the “Stop the Steal” charade, he’s eager to see the incumbent beaten, and he’s hoping that either Perdue or Vernon Jones, a more overtly MAGA-ish candidate, can do the job for him.As a result, the Georgia governor’s primary will effectively be a referendum not just on Trump’s general power in the G.O.P. but also on his specific ability to bully Republican elected officials in the event of a contested election. And reporters have an obligation to cover the campaign with that reality in mind, to stress the reasons this matchup is happening and its dangerous implications for how Republican officials might respond to a future attempt to overturn a presidential vote.But now comes the question: Is that the only thing that a responsible press is allowed to report during the campaign? Suppose, for instance, that midway through the race, some huge scandal erupts, involving obvious corruption that implicates Kemp. Should Georgia journalists decline to cover it, because a Kemp loss would empower anti-democratic forces? Or suppose the economy in Georgia tanks just before the primary, or Covid cases surge. Should civic-minded reporters highlight those stories, knowing that they may help Perdue win, or should they bury them, because democracy itself is in the balance?Or suppose a woman comes forward with an allegation of harassment against Perdue that doesn’t meet the normal standards for publication. Should journalists run with it anyway, on the theory that it would be good for American democracy if Perdue goes the way of Roy Moore, and that they can always correct the record later if the story falls apart?You can guess my answers to these questions. They are principled answers, reflecting a journalistic obligation to the truth that cannot be set aside for the sake of certain political results, however desirable for democracy those results may seem.But they are also pragmatic answers, because a journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will inevitably lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting, in the process, the very democratic order that it’s setting out to save.I think this has happened already. There were ways in which the national news media helped Trump in his path through the Republican primaries in 2016, by giving him constant celebrity-level hype at every other candidate’s expense. But from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump — positioning itself as the guardian of democracy, a moral arbiter rather than a neutral referee, determined to make Trump’s abnormal qualities and authoritarian tendencies the central story of his presidency.The results of this mind-set, unfortunately, included a lot of not particularly great journalism. The emergency mentality conflated Trumpian sordidness with something world-historical and treasonous, as in the overwrought Russia coverage seeded by the Steele dossier. It turned figures peripheral to national politics, from Nick Sandmann to Kyle Rittenhouse, into temporary avatars of incipient fascism. It invented anti-Trump paladins, from Michael Avenatti to Andrew Cuomo, who turned out to embody their own sort of moral turpitude. And it instilled an industrywide fear, palpable throughout the 2020 election, of any kind of coverage that might give too much aid and comfort to Trumpism — whether it touched on the summertime riots or Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Now you could argue that at least this mind-set achieved practical success, since Trump did lose in 2020. But he didn’t lose overwhelmingly, he gained voters in places the establishment did not expect, and he was able to turn media hostility to his advantage in his quest to keep control of his party, even in defeat. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era and became radically more polarized, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents maintaining a certain degree of confidence in the media and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents going very much the other way.This points to the essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place. You can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full.Which brings us to Joe Biden’s press coverage. I have a lot of doubts about the Milbank negativity algorithms, both because of the methodological problems identified by analysts like Nate Silver and also because, as a newsreader, my sense is that Trump’s negative coverage reflected more stalwart opposition (the president we oppose is being terrible again) while in Biden’s case the negativity often coexists with implicit sympathy (the president we support is blowing it, and we’re upset). But still, there’s no question that the current administration’s coverage has been pretty grim of late.But it’s turned grim for reasons that an objective and serious press corps would need to acknowledge in order to have any credibility at all. Piece by piece, you can critique the media’s handling of the past few months — I think the press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal was overwrought, for instance — but here’s the overall picture: A president who ran on restoring normalcy is dealing with a pandemic that stubbornly refuses to depart, rising inflation that his own White House didn’t predict, a border-crossing crisis that was likewise unanticipated, increasing military bellicosity from our major adversaries, stubbornly high homicide rates in liberal cities, a party that just lost a critical gubernatorial race and a stalled legislative agenda.And moreover, he’s confronting all of this while very palpably showing the effects of advancing age, even as his semi-anointed successor appears more and more like the protagonist of her own private “Veep.”Can some of these challenges recede and Biden’s situation improve? No doubt. But a news media charged with describing reality would accomplish absolutely nothing for the country if it tried to bury all these problems under headlines that were always and only about Trump.And one of the people for whom this approach would accomplish nothing is Biden himself. We just had an object lesson in what happens when the public dissatisfied with liberal governance gets a long lecture on why it should never vote Republican because of Trump: That was Terry McAuliffe’s argument in a state that went for Biden by 10 points, and McAuliffe lost. Having the media deliver that lecture nationally is likely to yield the same result for Democrats — not Trumpism’s defeat but their own.Far wiser, instead, to treat negative coverage as an example of the press living up to its primary mission, the accurate description of reality — which is still the place where the Biden administration and liberalism need a better strategy if they hope to keep the country on their side.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away?

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      Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote.If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy?If the Democratic Party has been thrust into that role — whether it wants it or not — recent election results and adverse polling trends suggest that it stands a good chance of losing both branches of Congress in 2022 and that Trump or a Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024.The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democratic difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate?If, as much evidence shows, working class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial, and gender issues than by economics — many non-college whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?I asked a group of scholars and Democratic strategists versions of these questions.Three conclusions stood out.There was near unanimous agreement that the Republican Party under the leadership of Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but disagreement over the degree of the danger.There was across the board opposition to the creation of a third party on the grounds that it would split the center and the left.In addition, a striking difference emerged when it came to the choice of strategic responses to the threat, between those who emphasize the built-in structural advantages benefiting the Republican Party and those who contend that Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues in order to regain support among working class voters, white, Black and Hispanic.Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard, argued in an email thatThe radicalized G.O.P. is the main anti-democratic force. Trump plays a crucial threatening role, but I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters. If Trump disappears or steps back, other Trumpists will step up, many are already in power.Skocpol’s point:Only repeated decisive electoral defeats would open the door to intraparty transformations, but the Electoral College, Senate non-metro bias and House skew through population distribution and gerrymandering make it unlikely that, in our two-party system, Democrats can prevail decisively.Because the Democratic Party is structurally weakened by the rural tilt of the Senate and the Electoral College — and especially vulnerable to gerrymandered districts because its voters are disproportionately concentrated in metro areas — the party “may not have enough elected power to accomplish basic voter and election protection reforms. Very bad things may happen soon,” Skocpol wrote. Republicans are positioned, she continued, “to undo majority democracy for a long time.”At the same time, Skocpol is sharply critical of trends within the Democratic Party:The advocacy groups and big funders and foundations around the Democratic Party — in an era of declining unions and mass membership groups — are pushing moralistic identity-based causes or specific policies that do not have majority appeal, understanding, or support, and using often weird insider language (like “Latinx”) or dumb slogans (“Defund the police”) to do it.The leaders of these groups, Skocpol stressed,often claim to speak for Blacks, Hispanics, women etc. without actually speaking to or listening to the real-world concerns of the less privileged people in these categories. That is arrogant and politically stupid. It happens in part because of the over-concentration of college graduate Democrats in isolated sectors of major metro areas, in worlds apart from most other Americans.Along similar lines, William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and former White House aide during the Clinton administration, wrote, “For the first time in my life, I have come to believe that the stability of our constitutional institutions can no longer be taken for granted.”Galston argues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party threatens to limit, if not prevent, efforts to enlarge support: “Everything depends on how much the Democrats really want to win. Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”“In my view,” Galston continued,the issue is not so much ideology as it is class. Working-class people with less than a college degree have an outlook that differs from that of the educated professionals whose outlook has come to dominate the Democratic Party. To the dismay of Democratic strategists, class identity may turn out to be more powerful that ethnic identity, especially for Hispanics.Democratic leaders generally and the Biden administration specifically, Galston said, have “failed to discharge, or even to recognize” their most important mission, the prevention of “Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office. They cannot do this with a program that drives away independents, moderates, and suburban voters, whose support made Biden’s victory possible.”The party’s “principal weakness,” Galston observes “lies in the realm of culture, which is why race, crime and schools have emerged as such damaging flash points.” In this context, “the Biden administration has failed to articulate views on immigration, criminal justice, education and related issues that a majority of Americans can support.”Not all of those I contacted have such a dire outlook.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, for example, agrees that “American democracy faced an unprecedented threat in 2020 when a sitting president refused to acknowledge electoral defeat,” but, she continued, “this threat was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed.”This, Lee points out, is “a story of Republicans judges and elected officials upholding democracy at personal cost to their own popularity with Republican voters. Republican elected officials in a number of cases sacrificed their political ambitions in service to larger democratic ideals.”Lee cautioned that polls showing majorities of Republican voters questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be taken with a grain of salt:It is likely that a significant share of those who profess such beliefs are just simply telling pollsters that they still support Trump. I would not declare the death of democratic legitimacy on the basis of what people say in public opinion polls, particularly given that Republican elected officials all across the country participated in upholding the validity of the 2020 outcome.Lee does agree that “election subversion is by far the most serious threat to American democracy,” and she contends that those seeking to protect democracy should “should focus on the major threat: Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize American elections and Republicans’ efforts in some states to undermine nonpartisan election administration.”Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she “certainly see threats, but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”At the same time, she cautioned,the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.ALG Research, one of the firms that polled for the 2020 Biden campaign, conducted postelection focus groups in Northern Virginia and suburban Richmond in an attempt to explore the success of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who defeated Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race a month ago.A report on the study of 2020 Biden voters who backed Youngkin or seriously considered doing so by Brian Stryker, an ALG partner, and Oren Savir, a senior associate, made the case that the election was “not about ‘critical race theory,’ as some analysts have suggested.” Instead, they continued, many swing voters knew thatC.R.T. wasn’t taught in Virginia schools. But at the same time, they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula.ALG focus group participantsthought Democrats are only focused on equality and fairness and not on helping people. None of these Biden voters associated our party with helping working people, the middle class, or people like them. They thought we were more focused on breaking down social barriers facing marginalized groups. They were all for helping marginalized groups, but the fact that they couldn’t point to anything we are doing to help them was deeply concerning.In a parallel argument, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, wrote in an essay, “Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars,” thatDemocrats are not on strong ground when they have to defend views that appear wobbly on rising violent crime, surging immigration at the border and non-meritocratic, race-essentialist approaches to education. They would be on much stronger ground if they became identified with an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but nonideological education for their children.Looking at the dangers facing American democracy from a different vantage point, Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” rejected the argument that Democrats need to constrain the party’s liberal wing.“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.They have won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 presidential elections — that’s almost unthinkable. They have also won the popular vote in the Senate in every six-year cycle since 2000. You cannot look at a party in a democracy that has won the popular vote almost without fail for two decades and say, gee, that party really has to get it together and address its “liabilities.”Instead, he argued,the liabilities lie in undemocratic electoral institutions such as the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate (where underpopulated states have an obscene amount of power that should be unacceptable in any democracy), gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts in many states, and recent political demographic trends — the concentration of Democratic votes in cities — that favor Republicans.“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’ ”Jacob Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale, takes a similar position, writing by email:There are powerful economic and social forces at work here, and they’re particularly powerful in the United States, given that it has a deep history of racial inequality and division and it is on the leading edge of the transformation toward a knowledge economy in which educated citizens are concentrated in urban metros. The question, then, is how much Democrat elites’ strategic choices matter relative to these powerful forces. I lean toward thinking they’re less important than we typically assume.Instead, Hacker argued, the Republican Party has becomeparticularly dangerous because it rests on an increasing commitment to and reliance on what we called “countermajoritarianism” — the exploitation of the anti-urban and status quo biases of the American political system, which allow an intense minority party with a rural base and mostly negative policy agenda to gain and wield outsized power.The conservative strategy, which Hacker calls “minoritarianism,” means that “Republicans can avoid decisive defeats even in the most unfavorable circumstances. There is very little electoral incentive for the party to moderate.”The result? “Neither electoral forces nor organized interests are much of a guardrail against a G.O.P. increasingly veering off the nation’s once-established democratic path.”Julie Wronski, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, described the systemic constraints on the Democratic Party in an email:In the current two-party system, the Democratic Party isn’t just the crucial institutional advocate of democracy. It is the only political entity that can address the federal and state-level institutions that undermine full and equal democratic representation in the United States. Decisive victories should be enough to send a message that Americans do not support anti-democratic behavior.The problem for Democrats, Wronski continued, is thatdecisive victories are unlikely to occur at the national level because of the two-party system and partisan gerrymanders. Winning elections (while necessary) is not enough, especially if core constituencies of Democratic voters are explicitly targeted through state-level voting restrictions and gerrymanders.Those who would seek to restore respect for democratic norms in Trump’s Republican Party face another set of problems, according to Wronski. At the moment, she writes, a fundamental raison d’être of the Republican Party is to prevent the political consignment “to minority status” of “whites, and in particular white Christians, whose share of the population, electorate, and federal-level office holders is diminishing.” This commitment effectively precludes the adoption of a more inclusive strategy of “appealing to racial, ethnic, and religious minority voters,” because such an appeal would amount to the abandonment of the Republican Party’s implicit (and often quite explicit) promise to prevent “the threat of minority status that demographic change poses to white Christians.”Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, anticipates, at least in the short term, a worsening of the political environment:Trump has the support of nearly half of American voters and is very likely to run for president in 2024. Given electoral trends, there is a high likelihood that he will win. Moreover, even if he doesn’t win legitimately, there is little doubt that he will once again try to subvert the election outcome. At that point, his party is likely to control both houses of Congress and he may be successful in his efforts.Enos argued in an email that “the liabilities of the Democratic Party can be overstated” when there isa more fundamental problem in that the working-class base, across racial groups, of the Democratic Party has eroded and is further eroding. That Democrats may not have yet hit rock bottom with working-class voters is terrifying for the future of the party. As much as people want to point to cultural issues as the primary reason for this decline in support, the wheels on the decline were put in motion by macroeconomic trends and policies that made the economic and social standing of working-class people in the United States extremely tenuous.Those trends worked to the advantage of Democrats as recently as the election of Barack Obama, Enos continued, when many working-class voters “looking for change, even voted for a Black man with a foreign-sounding name in 2008.” But, Enos continued, “when the Republican Party stumbled into a populist message of anti-elitism, protectionism, cultural chauvinism, and anti-immigration, it was almost inevitable that it would accelerate the pull of working-class voters toward Republicans.”At the moment, Enos believes, the outlook is bleak:Given the current institutional setup in the United States and the calcified nature of partisanship, I am not sure that Republicans can ever experience large-scale electoral defeat of the type that would shake them from their current path. In 2020, they were led by the most unpopular president in modern history running during a disastrous time for U.S. society and they still didn’t lose by much. That, perhaps, is the real issue — even though they are massively unpopular, partially because of their anti-democratic moves — the nature of U.S. elections means that they will never truly be electorally punished enough to cause them to reform.All of this raises a key question. Has the Republican Party passed a tipping point to become, irrevocably, the voice of ultranationalist racist authoritarianism?It may be that in too many voters’ minds the Democratic Party has also crossed a line and that Democratic adoption of more centrist policies on cultural issues — in combination with a focus on economic and health care issues — just won’t be enough to counter the structural forces fortifying the Republican minority, its by-any-means-necessary politics and its commitment to white hegemony.The Biden administration is, in fact, pushing an agenda of economic investment and expanded health care, but the public is not yet responding. Part of this failure lies with the administration’s suboptimal messaging. More threatening to the party, however, is the possibility that a growing perception of the Democratic Party as wedded to progressive orthodoxies now blinds a large segment of the electorate to the positive elements — let’s call it a trillion-dollar bread-and-butter strategy — of what Biden and his party are trying to do.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Redistricting Makes California a Top House Battlefield for 2022

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      As legislators across the country draw House maps to protect incumbents, a nonpartisan commission of California citizens is drafting one that will scramble political fortunes for both parties.FRESNO, Calif. — For nearly three years, Phil Arballo has been running for Congress against Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican that Democrats across the country have loved to loathe, raising money by the truckload and compiling an email outreach list that is all the more impressive considering his lack of political experience.On Monday, Mr. Nunes announced he would resign from Congress at year’s end to lead former President Donald J. Trump’s media and technology company, continuing an unswerving fealty to Mr. Trump that had turned him into a national figure of admiration on the right and contempt on the left.Mr. Nunes was prodded toward that decision in large part by the nonpartisan California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which this week is putting the finishing touches on new boundaries.The plan is likely to transform the district he has represented for 19 years from a dusty, rural swath that voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 by 5 percentage points into one centered here in Fresno, the fifth-largest city in California, which Joseph R. Biden Jr. would have carried handily.Mr. Arballo, who lost to Mr. Nunes last year and had been hoping to challenge him again, realizes he will have a different opponent.“It’s going to be fun, though,” Mr. Arballo said, speaking from his spare campaign headquarters in a nondescript office park here. “And what we can do is also wash away the gerrymandering that’s going to be happening all over the country.”Legislatures from Nevada to Georgia are drafting new House district lines under the required reapportionment that occurs every 10 years. Most of them are seeking to protect incumbency and maintain a partisan edge by eliminating competitive seats, a process that Republicans in particular have exploited to gain a heavy early advantage in their push to wrest control of the House next year. The Justice Department filed suit on Monday against a Texas map gerrymandered by the Republican-led legislature that would make that state redder, potentially leaving only a single district in play.Mr. Nunes in Washington last year. He announced on Monday that he would resign from Congress to lead former President Donald J. Trump’s media and technology company.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut in California, the map will stand in stark contrast to most of the country, scrambling the fortunes of lawmakers in both parties and creating the broadest — perhaps the only — true battlefield for 2022. Lawmakers should see the full plan by Friday, and the commission will send it to the secretary of state by Dec. 27.Legislatures in nine other states, working off the 2020 census, have completed new maps of 116 House districts. In only 10 of those would the candidate who won 2020 have prevailed by 7 percentage points or less, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project; that is half the number of competitive districts that existed in 2018 and 2020.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.In contrast, California alone could end up with eight or nine battleground districts.“There’s no question we’re going to end up with more competitive seats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in Sacramento.The first draft of the map shocked much of the California delegation. No longer able to count on his rural, agricultural base, Mr. Nunes would have had to win over the gracious neighborhoods along Van Ness Avenue in Fresno, with their verandas and Black Lives Matter flags, and the hipsters of the city’s Tower District, who have more affection for Devin Nunes’ Cow, a Twitter account mocking the congressman, than the man himself. The commission appears intent on giving Latinos in the Central Valley a chance to elect their first representative ever.Mr. Nunes could have moved to a new district taking shape along the Nevada border, which will be heavily Republican, but he chose to go elsewhere. He was not alone in pondering a new future. After losing his San Diego-area seat to a Democrat in 2018, another outspoken conservative, Darrell Issa, moved to a conservative district abandoned by the indicted Republican Duncan Hunter. That seat could end up far more competitive.Representative Mike Garcia, a Republican, won a special election to replace a young Democrat felled by a sex scandal, then shocked Democrats by winning re-election last year by 333 votes in a district that Mr. Biden won by 35,000. The commission, however, appears intent on lopping off Republican-heavy Simi Valley from Mr. Garcia’s district in north Los Angeles County, leaving him holding on by a thread to a considerably less conservative seat.“It makes guys like me perk up and go, ‘OK, what was the rationale for dumping this?’” Mr. Garcia said of the commission’s decision. “When you go through all the questions that are, in my opinion, objective, the only thing you’re left with is a rationale that is political.”Democrats are at risk, too. The commission has proposed eliminating the Los Angeles seat of Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, who in 1992 became the first Mexican American woman elected to Congress. Representative Katie Porter, a hero of the national Democratic Party, appears likely to be left with a more Republican district in Orange County — a fate that could prompt her to run for the Senate instead, either by challenging Alex Padilla, the Democrat appointed to fill Vice President Kamala Harris’s seat, or waiting for Senator Dianne Feinstein, 88, to step aside.Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard on Capitol Hill in 2019. The nonpartisan California Citizens Redistricting Commission has proposed eliminating her seat.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesCalifornia’s 10th Congressional District, currently represented by Representative Josh Harder, a young, up-and-coming Democrat, will become heavily Republican, most likely sending Mr. Harder in search of a new district. (It was the expected destination of Mr. Nunes.) That could cost the quiet backbench Democrat Jerry McNerney, who might find himself a sacrificial lamb.The former governor who set the process in motion, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is watching the free-for-all with glee. When he took office in 2003, he had never thought of redistricting reform, he said in an interview last week. But what he found was a system he called “wacky,” in which Democrats and Republicans came together every 10 years to redraw the lines of State Assembly districts, State Senate seats and U.S. House seats to preserve the status quo — politicians picking their voters, not the other way around.“It was worse than the Politburo,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican who came to office after a recall election. “The Constitution says, ‘We the people,’ not ‘We the politicians.’”From 2002 to 2010, one California congressional district changed party hands. Since 2012, when the first map of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s redistricting commission went into effect, 16 seats have flipped. He called it “without doubt” one of his proudest achievements.The commission includes five Republicans, five Democrats and four members not affiliated with a party, selected from citizen applicants. Commissioner J. Ray Kennedy, a Democrat, said the panel must create districts of equal population that are contiguous and compact, and to the extent practicable, keep counties, cities, neighborhoods and “communities of interest” together.A person should be able to walk from any part of a district to another without crossing into a different one, though bulges and loops do form to comply with the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that minority voters get representation. Competitiveness is not a criterion, but it is a byproduct.Compliance with the Voting Rights Act could create the first two Latino districts in the Central Valley, to the detriment of two Republicans: Mr. Nunes and Representative David Valadao, who will square off next year with Rudy Salas, a member of the State Assembly and a prime Democratic recruit. The district remains highly competitive but will slightly shift from Fresno and into Mr. Salas’s stronghold of Bakersfield.“The way that the commission is looking at this independently, it’s actually shifting the district toward my home base, Kern County, which is my media market, where they’ve known me for at least 12-plus years since my time at City Council, and now with the State Assembly,” Mr. Salas said on Tuesday. “So I feel very confident.”The contrast between California and the rest of the country is stark.Ryan Mulcahy, the campaign manager for Mr. Arballo’s congressional campaign, in Fresno, Calif., on Friday.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesIn Georgia, Republican legislators collapsed two competitive districts won narrowly by Democrats into one heavily Democratic district in suburban Atlanta. The state will have no competitive districts next year.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More